January 20, 2006
from EnglishPravda Website

Some events that are often referred to as 'coincidental' have another definition - the 'phenomenon of synchronism'

Strange things happen to everyone. Science can not interpret them in a logic or reasonable way, and therefore they are regarded as mere coincidences. For example, an old friend calls you up a minute after a distant recollection flashes through your head.

Or somebody pays you back when you desperately need money. There are other coincidences that are a lot complex and even more astounding, they make you think about the inexplicable and the divine intervention. Who do they happened contrary to all laws of nature and science?

A ship sunk near the shores of Wales on December 5, 1664. Another ship went down on the same location on December 5, 1785. A third ship sunk to the bottom of the sea on the same location on December 5, 1866. Each of the shipwrecks had only one survivor. In all the three cases, a survivor's name was Hugh Williams.

There is another story of amazing coincidence relating to the fate of U.S. President John Kennedy and U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

The simplest coincidence has to do with the surnames of the two presidents. Both surnames are made up of seven letters. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a theater, his assassin tried to hide in a warehouse. Lee Harvey Oswald fired his rifle from the position in a warehouse, he tried to hide in a theater. President Lincoln had a secretary called Kennedy; President Kennedy had a secretary called Lincoln.

On a hot July night of 1930, a policeman called Allan Folby from Texas got in a car crash and damaged a femoral artery in his leg. He would have bled to death had not a passerby intervened and saved his live. The passerby's name was Alfred Smith. He applied a tourniquet and Folby stopped bleeding. The policeman recovered and went back to his beat. Five years later, he got a call to proceed to a car crash site. He saw a man lying on the ground. The man was bleeding, his femoral artery was apparently damaged. The man's name was Alfred Smith: he was the very man who saved Folby's live in the past under the same circumstances.

Why do such coincidences take place?

Many people believe such events are in fact made on purpose to make a person take a more careful look at his or her life and interpret its events in a more serious manner. Just like somebody sends us a message that reads: trust your intuition. Maybe the cosmos (God ) gives an impulse or a clue: believe in coincidence.

The latter assumption may seem unscientific. However, let us not forget that some events we call “coincidental” other people have been calling the “phenomenon of synchronism” for a long time.

Two outstanding scientists came up with the term regardless of each of other.

Nobel Prize winners in physics Wolfgang Pauili and Carl Gustaf Jung, a famous psychologist and psychoanalyst, arrived at the conclusion that simultaneous occurrence of causally unrelated events has meaning beyond mere coincidence. Those events may occur without any reason or respect to existing laws of nature. The laws of nature are not absolute, said the scientists while explaining their positions.

Both Jung and Pauli maintained that relations between the events can be of fundamental meaning to man even though the belief is in contradiction to the fixed concepts of the universe and its principal laws.